One-on-one with Carlos Ghosn, the most powerful man in the e
Enviado: 25 ago 2011, 12:22
One-on-one with Carlos Ghosn, the most powerful man in the electric car world
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"If I was a trendy journalist in the 1970s, dressed in a beige safari suit with hair to my shoulders and I got an interview with a world leader like Nixon or Georges Pompidou it would have been considered a major scoop.
By Robert Llewellyn on June 10, 2011 4:08 PM
My chain-smoking mates back at the busy newspaper office would have looked at me with envy as I waltzed in with my dog-eared notebook. But I’m not a journalist and this is the age of the blog, the vlog and the tweet, I’ll get no accolades or awards, there’ll be no retrospective in 20 years time called ‘When Bobby met Carlos’; but for me, it certainly was a scoop-ette.
The man I drove to the airport today in a Nissan LEAF is not a world leader in a political sense, although he’d just been to 10 Downing Street to have a chat with Dave and Nick. That’s Prime Minister David Cameron and Deputy PM Nick Clegg, for the hard-of-politics. The man’s name is Carlos Ghosn (pronounced ‘Goan’) and he’s the CEO of the Renault-Nissan alliance.
When Ghosn 10 years ago took over the reins at the then ailing Japanese car giant Nissan, he had a look through all the research and development projects the company had been busy with. He closed down more than half of them immediately, slashing and burning his way through the massive debts the company had accrued. But one section he kept going was the battery research department.
Nissan had already done a great deal of ‘R&D’ on electric vehicle batteries and over the next 10 years it built and tested many variants, which culminated in this year’s launch onto the market of the Nissan LEAF.
As Ghosn proudly – and rightly – claims, it is the first mass-produced vehicle built from the ground up as an electric car. It’s not an existing model that had its engine, gearbox and fuel tank removed and the hole stuffed with batteries made by someone else.
The whole vehicle was built as an electric car, and it really shows.
“Do you like the LEAF?” he asked me as we set off. I told him I did; I compared it in build quality and handling to the very latest VW Golfs. He didn’t look too happy.
I fumbled nervously, and then tried to explain what I meant. “It’s like the Golf as in it’s like a car that has had 30 plus years development and refinement.” He liked that.
“And yet this is the first iteration,” he said. “We are very pleased with the work we have put in.”
He has what sounds like a French accent, and yet was born in Brazil to a French mother and Lebanese father. He was educated in France and speaks five languages. I was educated in Oxfordshire and I can speak 1.02 languages.
“We have spent over 4 billion Euros developing this car,” he continued. “We will be building them in three countries – Japan, the United States and, of course, the UK. The LEAF represents a vision, the vision of the future of autonomous transportation and it’s also a vision of society.”
Heady stuff, but at the moment Nissan is leagues ahead of the competition; no one other than Renault is anywhere near them. And, of course, Renault is its sister company.
Ghosn seems very aware that this venture carries a certain amount of risk for Nissan. He claims that the only question remaining isn’t if the car works or if it’s reliable, but if the consumer will accept it.
He put the whole electric car debate in perspective when he told me that in 2010, out of 73 million cars sold globally, 20,000 were electric. It’s still a tiny proportion of the market, and yet in five years Nissan plans to have created 1.5 million electric cars.
After the last four or five years of waffling on this subject, or hearing other people waffling about it, I have realised that sometimes we waffle with great authority based on genuine facts and experience, and sometimes we just waffle.
So it was a total pleasure and revelation to listen to a man who not only understands the big debate about the future of energy – how we create and consume it – but has a very sharp mind and a genuine grasp on the real, down-to-earth facts about the car industry, the oil industry and governments around the world and how they operate.
I think it’s fair to say I’m now a bit of a Ghosn fanboy."
Em: http://www.thechargingpoint.com/opinion ... world.html
~"If I was a trendy journalist in the 1970s, dressed in a beige safari suit with hair to my shoulders and I got an interview with a world leader like Nixon or Georges Pompidou it would have been considered a major scoop.
By Robert Llewellyn on June 10, 2011 4:08 PM
My chain-smoking mates back at the busy newspaper office would have looked at me with envy as I waltzed in with my dog-eared notebook. But I’m not a journalist and this is the age of the blog, the vlog and the tweet, I’ll get no accolades or awards, there’ll be no retrospective in 20 years time called ‘When Bobby met Carlos’; but for me, it certainly was a scoop-ette.
The man I drove to the airport today in a Nissan LEAF is not a world leader in a political sense, although he’d just been to 10 Downing Street to have a chat with Dave and Nick. That’s Prime Minister David Cameron and Deputy PM Nick Clegg, for the hard-of-politics. The man’s name is Carlos Ghosn (pronounced ‘Goan’) and he’s the CEO of the Renault-Nissan alliance.
When Ghosn 10 years ago took over the reins at the then ailing Japanese car giant Nissan, he had a look through all the research and development projects the company had been busy with. He closed down more than half of them immediately, slashing and burning his way through the massive debts the company had accrued. But one section he kept going was the battery research department.
Nissan had already done a great deal of ‘R&D’ on electric vehicle batteries and over the next 10 years it built and tested many variants, which culminated in this year’s launch onto the market of the Nissan LEAF.
As Ghosn proudly – and rightly – claims, it is the first mass-produced vehicle built from the ground up as an electric car. It’s not an existing model that had its engine, gearbox and fuel tank removed and the hole stuffed with batteries made by someone else.
The whole vehicle was built as an electric car, and it really shows.
“Do you like the LEAF?” he asked me as we set off. I told him I did; I compared it in build quality and handling to the very latest VW Golfs. He didn’t look too happy.
I fumbled nervously, and then tried to explain what I meant. “It’s like the Golf as in it’s like a car that has had 30 plus years development and refinement.” He liked that.
“And yet this is the first iteration,” he said. “We are very pleased with the work we have put in.”
He has what sounds like a French accent, and yet was born in Brazil to a French mother and Lebanese father. He was educated in France and speaks five languages. I was educated in Oxfordshire and I can speak 1.02 languages.
“We have spent over 4 billion Euros developing this car,” he continued. “We will be building them in three countries – Japan, the United States and, of course, the UK. The LEAF represents a vision, the vision of the future of autonomous transportation and it’s also a vision of society.”
Heady stuff, but at the moment Nissan is leagues ahead of the competition; no one other than Renault is anywhere near them. And, of course, Renault is its sister company.
Ghosn seems very aware that this venture carries a certain amount of risk for Nissan. He claims that the only question remaining isn’t if the car works or if it’s reliable, but if the consumer will accept it.
He put the whole electric car debate in perspective when he told me that in 2010, out of 73 million cars sold globally, 20,000 were electric. It’s still a tiny proportion of the market, and yet in five years Nissan plans to have created 1.5 million electric cars.
After the last four or five years of waffling on this subject, or hearing other people waffling about it, I have realised that sometimes we waffle with great authority based on genuine facts and experience, and sometimes we just waffle.
So it was a total pleasure and revelation to listen to a man who not only understands the big debate about the future of energy – how we create and consume it – but has a very sharp mind and a genuine grasp on the real, down-to-earth facts about the car industry, the oil industry and governments around the world and how they operate.
I think it’s fair to say I’m now a bit of a Ghosn fanboy."
Em: http://www.thechargingpoint.com/opinion ... world.html